Help please...How can 1 letter make a difference?

[spiceboy]

This is a very specific query and a bit convoluted but I can't explain it any other way!

I have an Indian foods shopping website (UK based) . We rank top 5 organic on Google UK (my biggest market) for all of our key generic search phrases. One of my key phrases is "Indian foods" which is currently No.2 organic in Google serps, the same position for about a year.

My most used search term however is "Indian food" - ie one letter different - singular not plural. We have never managed to get above above 15 in the organic listings for this term but just recently we have disappeared altogether from Google with this term.

The page that we use to optimise for this phrase is http://www.natco-online.com/acatalog/index.html and this page now never appears in any listings for "Indian food". This is probably the reason for a recent drop in sales.

The first page which gets picked up on Google for "Indian foods" isnt even optimised for that search term, it is optimised for 'indian cooking" ie http://www.natco-online.com/
and below that appears the correctly optimised page ie http://www.natco-online.com/acatalog/
but neither of these pages appears for "Indian food" ie the singular version!

Both pages have a Google PR of 5 and several of the higher ranking pages for "Indian food" have only a PR3!

I am completely flummoxed on this. Can anyone tell me why another page appears for "Indian foods" than the one we have tried to optimise for and why the addition or omission of 1 letter "s" on a search term has such radically different results?

What am I missing?

Spiceboy

[Spectur]

SPice boy,

Welcome to google. sometimes theere is not rhyme or reason ( atleast an obvious one) to how google works.

I looked at your site and the code seems good.

what are your inbound linkjs like for the your key phrase ?

you may need to do some link building with the key phrase to get back up in the listings.

And yes a single letter can make a difference.

[spiceboy]

Hi Spectur

Inbound links on http://www.natco-online.com/ is 40 links (not surprising its the home page)

Inbound links on http://www.natco-online.com/acatalog/ is 9 links, so maybe I do need more IBLs on that page.

But - both pages are a PR5? Other pages show up well with the same amount of links, is it just that "Indian food" is a more competitive term? How come pages with only PR3 and no links get higher listings?

Still flummoxed.

[cspelts]

Get some back links from other sites with Indian Food as the anchor text. It really doesn't matter if the link is to your front page or an internal page - the key is using your keywords in the link text.

Remember the Google Bomb? Searching for "miserable failure" takes you to Gearge Bush's site, even though the phrase does not exist anywhere on that page. That's the power of back links that use keywords.

[SafariMan]

Hi Spiceboy,

I think for the most part it is simply that indian food is a more competitive term.

For UK pages only, G reports these number of results

indian foods - 184,000
indian food - 1,300,000

What PR3 page with no links are you refering to? I checked
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/ejones/ufdi/links.html
and it does have links to it - even though "link:" in Google shows nothing, keep in mind that G does not report all links it considers. The 2 pages I checked for that one had "Indian Food" in the theme of the page and the anchor text.

I'm not an expert, but I would continue to focus on indian foods, as that automatically includes the singular as well, but for safety's sake - get a couple of links with the singular as well.

[spiceboy]

Hi SafariMan

I was referring to the same site you checked (which incidentally links back to us one way but it links to the homepage not the "Indian foods" page - a very early link).

"link:"gave me 0 links on Google for http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/ejones/ufdi/links.html . Assuming it does have links not showing on Google, its still a PR3 page - does this mean that links outweigh PR in deciding organic positions?

PS thanks for the indian food link.

Hi Cspelts

I have hundreds of links from directories etc a proportion of which use the title "Natco Online Indian Food & Spices" or something similar, is this what you mean? Most of them go to the home page however.

Hey guys I've just had an idea, now that you've seen my problem and had the kindness to offer advice, how about a "Indian food" keyword reciprocal link to my "Indian foods" page? I can put you on my links page which is a PR4 and not many links? Goes for you too Spectur?

Beginning to see the light.

[sem-seo-pro]

Hi there

Being as the site theme is "indian foods" that would be another reason the index page does well for the term.

As to why the other optimized page does not...it's google...you are better off focusing on how to better the customers you still have to sales as opposed to worrying over a search spider.

Also not sure if you know it or not but you should be striving for front page in Yahoo as it is a shopping engine and google is a research engine.

Those looking to buy indian foods online would likely use Yahoo and those who want to learn the method of cooking or what inidan foods are would use google.

"Building a business which relies heavily on googlebots results, is edgeplay most should avoid "

Not knowing where to properly market your business is another issue you should look at closely in order to maximize ROI.

Clint

[SafariMan]

I'm not sure this is the right place to exchange links and, despite my own previous misconceptions, I now strongly believe in relevant links.

Why not start by changing the anchor text in your signature on WebProWorld to something appropriate? Currently you're just using your URL.

As for links outweighing PR, I don't think it's as simple as that. I'm sure I read somewhere that there are more than 100 factors that influence Google SERPS - but quality links definitely seem to be the most important.

[spiceboy]

Hi sem-seo-pro

Interesting point you have there and I beg to differ. I have advertised on both Adwords and Overture PPC for the last 18 months but gave up on Overture as almost 80% of the conversions came from Google. Even on the odd month when both have been turned off, Google still comes out ahead - we have a search engine identifier on the order form.

Just checked the Yahoo Uk positions for 4 main phrases as follows

"Indian Food "- No 7 (Yahoo directory listing) No 26 (one of my pages)
"Indian Foods" - No 1(Yahoo directory listing) No 11 (one of my pages)
"Indian Spices" - No 1 (Yahoo directory listing) No 4 (one of my pages)
"Indian Cooking" - No 1 (Yahoo directory listing) (nowhere!)

Strange that Yahoo seems to love my directory listing but is ignoring (mainly) my site pages?

Seems like changing the title on my Yahoo directory listing a few months ago is proving useful. I think the other pages are not yet showing up as I changed all the meta descriptions and text copy on most of the pages to make them (hopefully) more Yahoo friendly a week ago. Time will tell.

Thanks for all your input, its been really useful, but I am not sure I am any wiser!

"The more you learn, the less you know"

Spiceboy

[promoking]

All good info gentlemen, and others, however...

do a google search for "indian food" WITH parentheses and then do another search WITH parentheses for "indian foods" and you'll see optimized pages/competitors of 1,800,000 and 39,000 respectively.

You do well for the plural because you are only up against 39,000 sites vs 1,800,000

If you want to rank well for the singular "indian food" you gotta do all that other linking stuff

Cheers,